New York gets it right

Published 9:28 pm, Sunday, July 21, 2013

THE ISSUE:

Gov. Andrew Cuomo comes up with the flood aid that the federal government balked at.

THE STAKES:

Albany is the source of help, not scandal. Let's hope that continues.

This one is for everyone in New York who lives well beyond the state capital and the reach it can have in people's jobs and lives here. It's for people perhaps less passionate than we are about corruption in state government and the fight to stop it. It's for everybody who pays their share of some steep tax bills and expects in return just a reasonable level of state services.

It's a story of government working as it should, for a pleasant change.

In Fort Plain and the surrounding towns in the Mohawk Valley and elsewhere in upstate New York, the crisis demanding government attention wasn't the usual metaphorical Albany cesspool. It was a literal cesspool — streets and houses full of all the grime and muck that some especially severe flooding brought late last month.

The storm wasn't widespread enough to get national media attention. It didn't even get a name like, say, Sandy or Irene or Lee. But it was devastating to a lot of people whom we consider neighbors.

And now comes $16 million in state aid for these victims, including 1,200 homeowners whose property was so badly damaged that abandoning it might well be the most prudent thing to do. For them, payment from the state will cover what their houses were worth before the latest episode of extreme weather struck.

Mr. Cuomo can justifiably claim the high ground. The usual political suspicions and objections simply don't apply here.

A governor often taken to task — on this page and elsewhere — for his end runs around the state Legislature didn't wait to bring lawmakers back into formal session this time, either. But he did consult with legislative leaders. And, really, even in this Legislature, scandal-plagued and heavily influenced by political self-interest, who's about to object to government coming to the assistance of the victims of a genuine disaster?

Bureaucrats at the Federal Emergency Management Agency were willing to help towns and cities with necessary infrastructure repairs, but not individual homeowners. Mr. Cuomo could have fought FEMA over that, and Rep. Chris Gibson, R-Kinderhook, and Sen. Chuck Schumer urged him to do just that. But coming up with money that was needed yesterday, not weeks from now, was the right thing to do first. So the governor acted.

Even the usual question of where the state would get the money takes a different twist, too, minus the frequent skepticism of "your tax dollars at work." The state budget actually has set aside money, on a fiscal contingency of sorts, to pay for the disaster relief that's likely to become more frequently needed as climate change brings more frequent bad storms.

We're not about to conclude on a trite note suggesting that everything is now all right. Too many people still have too much rebuilding to do, physically and psychologically. But this time, a much maligned state government — and fairly so — is an ally, not an obstacle.